Frequently asked questions about SEO audits

An SEO audit is a structured diagnosis of why your website isn't ranking, converting, or growing the way it should. An Illucrum audit covers 46 points across technical SEO, on-page optimisation, keyword strategy, backlinks, competitor positioning, and conversion UX. The output is a prioritised action plan with scored severity, not a generic checklist.

An Illucrum SEO audit costs between $297 and $597 depending on the audit type and tier. The Website SEO audit starts at $297 (Basic) and runs to $597 (Full). The SaaS and E-commerce audits start at $297 (Basic) and run to $597 (Full). See the full pricing page for what each tier includes.

Five to eight business days from intake to delivery for most audits. E-commerce Full audits run slightly longer (up to nine business days) because category and product templates multiply the number of pages to review. We don't promise 24-hour audits because they don't exist; a real audit requires both automated crawls and manual review.

Each Illucrum audit includes a written PDF report, a scoring spreadsheet with all 46 checks, an action plan formatted for your project management tool, implementation notes for the top findings, and an optional 30-minute walkthrough call. See what's delivered for the full list.

Most sites see measurable movement in 3 to 6 months, with meaningful business impact at 6 to 12 months. Brand-new domains take longer because Google evaluates them carefully before allowing them to compete. Established sites with existing authority can see results faster.

Paid ads stop the day you stop paying. SEO compounds: an article that ranks today still earns traffic in 2028. SEO converts 84.62% more users than PPC on average, and 49% of marketers say organic search has the best ROI of any channel. The smart play is rarely "one or the other"; it's running paid for speed and SEO for compounding ROI.

Yes, though the game has changed. AI Overviews now appear on about 25% of Google queries and reduce CTR on position 1 from 1.41% to 0.64% when they show up. However, only about 20% of URLs cited by ChatGPT and Perplexity also rank in Google's top 10. Ranking on Google and earning AI citations are now two related but distinct disciplines. A modern audit covers both.

A tool gives you data. An audit interprets the data, prioritises what matters, and tells you what to ignore. Most teams have access to tools and still don't know what to do next. That's the gap an audit fills. See the full audit vs tool comparison for when each makes sense.

The audit is a one-off diagnosis: you see what's wrong, you decide what to fix, you implement (or hire help) accordingly. A retainer is ongoing monthly work on an open scope. We recommend audit-first because retainers without diagnosis tend to produce work that looks productive but addresses symptoms instead of causes. See audit vs retainer for the full explanation.

For a small site in a low-competition niche, you can. For a site you'd describe as commercial or competitive, hiring an experienced auditor will catch issues you won't, faster than you can. The decision is mostly about your time vs the audit cost. See audit vs DIY for the breakdown.

Yes, read-only access to GSC and Google Analytics is the minimum. For e-commerce audits, we also need read access to the platform admin so we can see the configuration that public-facing crawlers can't. Access is granted to a dedicated audit email and revoked at delivery.

You decide. Most clients implement the highest-impact fixes themselves and bring us in for the deeper technical work. Some take the report and execute everything in-house. Some scope ongoing implementation support directly with us. The audit is written to stand on its own; nothing about it requires further engagement.

SaaS buyers behave differently. They research for weeks or months across multiple intent stages: awareness ("what is X software"), consideration ("X vs Y", "best X tools"), and decision ("X pricing", "X free trial"). A SaaS SEO strategy that ignores this funnel attracts traffic that never converts to trials. The competitive context is also unforgiving: SaaS keywords like "best CRM" are among the most expensive and contested terms on the internet, because each conversion is worth hundreds or thousands in lifetime revenue.

The 3-year average SEO ROI for B2B SaaS is 702%, with a break-even time of about 7 months. Organic search typically costs 40% less than paid acquisition for B2B SaaS, and as content compounds, the per-customer cost can drop to around $290 per acquired customer over time. For context, the median B2B paid search CAC is about $802.

Bottom-of-funnel keywords first, even if their volume is lower. "Alternatives" pages, "vs" comparison pages, "[competitor] pricing", and "best [category] for [specific use case]" terms convert at 8 to 15% on average, whereas top-of-funnel informational queries convert at 1 to 5%. The right question for every keyword is: "Are the people searching this actually my buyers?" Search volume alone is a vanity metric in SaaS.

Yes, and they're often the highest-leverage content a SaaS site can build. Comparison and alternatives pages catch buyers actively evaluating options. Integration pages ("YourTool + Slack", "YourTool + HubSpot") rank for high-intent searches from users of those tools, and companies with 50+ integration pages often get 20 to 30% of their organic traffic from integration searches.

A topic cluster is a pillar page covering a broad subject (e.g. "client onboarding for SaaS") supported by multiple sub-articles targeting specific subtopics, all interlinking. This structure builds topical authority that signals depth to Google. It's effective once your domain has some baseline authority. For brand-new SaaS sites with low Domain Rating, the smarter early-stage move is to win specific bottom-of-funnel keywords first and build clusters once you have momentum.

It matters more in SaaS than in many other verticals because the keyword space is unusually competitive. The average DR across 28,250 SaaS websites is around 62.6. If your site is under DR 30, head-on competition for category keywords will struggle. The path is long-tail, comparison-based, and integration-based keywords first, while building authority over 12 to 18 months.

Possibly, but probably not without deliberate effort. Only about 20% of URLs cited by AI engines also rank in Google's top 10. AI engines disproportionately cite Reddit, Wikipedia, YouTube, LinkedIn, and listicles on independent third-party sites. For SaaS, this means building presence across review platforms (G2, Capterra), founder-led LinkedIn content, and earning mentions in "best [category]" listicles on authoritative sites.

A good benchmark is 2 to 5% of organic visitors starting a free trial, with homepage conversion typically higher (5 to 10%) because homepage visitors have stronger brand intent. If your organic-to-trial rate is well below 2%, the bottleneck is rarely "more traffic". It's the gap between what visitors expected when they clicked and what they found on the landing page.

For most SaaS companies, no, and that's the wrong framing. Paid gives you speed and lets you test keywords before committing to ranking for them organically. SEO gives you compounding economics. Companies like HubSpot, Ahrefs, and Atlassian generate 70%+ of their pipeline from organic search, but they got there by running both channels for years. The audit identifies the highest-leverage SEO bets to make now while paid keeps the pipeline alive.

Realistically, 6 to 12 months for meaningful pipeline impact. Technical fixes and on-page optimisation can show movement within 3 months, but ranking for competitive SaaS terms and building the topical authority that converts requires 12 to 18 months of consistent investment. Anyone promising faster is selling speed at the expense of durability.

About 43% of all e-commerce traffic comes from organic search, making it the single largest traffic channel for online stores. Paid ads, social, and email combined typically generate less. And unlike paid traffic, organic visitors convert at higher rates on average (around 2.8% from organic search vs around 1% from PPC), because they're actively searching for what you sell.

The 3-year average e-commerce SEO ROI is around 317%, with break-even at about 9 months. Put differently, every $1 invested in e-commerce SEO returns about $2.75 to $5.30 depending on store size and execution. By comparison, paid ads typically deliver a 2 to 4x return that stops the moment you stop spending.

Technical SEO failures, by a wide margin. 62.4% of e-commerce sites have at least one broken link, 70.5% are rated "needs improvement" on Lighthouse performance, and 53% have missing canonical tags. These are silent revenue leaks. They don't show up in your dashboards, but they quietly suppress rankings and conversions. An audit catches them before you keep losing.

A lot. A 0.1-second improvement in load time increases retail conversion rates by 8.4% and average order value by 9.2% (Deloitte/Google data). Conversely, every additional second of delay reduces conversions by about 7%. Sites loading in 1 second convert at 3.05% while sites loading in 4 seconds convert at 0.67%, a 4.5x difference.

Category pages, in most cases. Well-optimised category pages typically generate 3 to 5x more organic revenue than individual product pages because they rank for high-volume head terms and capture buyers earlier in the journey. Product pages convert higher per visitor, but category pages do the heavy lifting of bringing the visitor in.

Yes, and it's one of the highest-leverage technical fixes. Product schema enables rich results (price, star ratings, availability) directly in Google's search results, which can increase organic CTR by an average of 30%. BreadcrumbList schema and Organization schema are similarly important. Most off-the-shelf platforms (Shopify, WooCommerce) include basic schema by default, but it's frequently misconfigured or incomplete.

It can, badly. Filter combinations can generate millions of near-duplicate URLs that drain crawl budget and split link equity across versions of the same page. The fix isn't to remove filters: it's to combine canonical tags, robots directives, and URL parameter handling to consolidate equity onto the main category pages while letting Google know which filtered URLs to ignore.

Less than for informational queries. Only about 0.3% of AI Overviews currently include an e-commerce source, because transactional queries usually trigger product carousels, Shopping ads, or local results instead. The bigger AI Overview impact on e-commerce is on the informational side ("how to choose X", "best Y for Z"), where 60% of US shoppers now report using AI tools for purchase decisions. Your content needs to be cite-able by AI systems, not just rank on Google.

Critical. 57% of global e-commerce sales now happen on mobile, projected to reach 59% in 2025. Google uses mobile-first indexing for all sites, meaning your mobile version is what Google evaluates for rankings. A site that's beautiful on desktop but slow or broken on mobile is invisible to over half of buyers and ranked accordingly.

Yes. Product pages with customer reviews receive 18% more traffic on average, and reviews influence purchasing decisions for 97% of consumers. Combined with Review schema, they also enable star ratings in search results, boosting organic CTR. Yet 98% of low-performing e-commerce brands fail to use UGC properly, so this remains a competitive advantage available to anyone who implements it well.

If they're the manufacturer's copy verbatim, they're identical to every other retailer carrying the same product. Google deduplicates this content and picks one version to rank, usually Amazon or the manufacturer. Retailers that rewrite meta titles and product descriptions see an average 32% increase in organic sales. Original product copy is rarely glamorous work, but it's one of the highest-ROI optimisations in e-commerce SEO.

Your own site, if growth and margins matter. Marketplace SEO is closed-loop: you're optimising for the platform's rankings, paying their take rate, and never building a brand you own. Your own site lets you compound brand authority, retarget visitors, and capture customer data. The right strategy for most stores is to be on marketplaces for reach while building your own organic channel for durability.

The Website audit is the general-purpose version. It fits service businesses (consultancies, agencies, professional services), local businesses, blogs, content sites, and any site that doesn't fit the SaaS or e-commerce profile. The framework is the same 46 points; the weighting prioritises the checks that matter for these site types.

The check framework is identical. The difference is in weighting and depth. The SaaS audit goes deep on funnel-stage content, comparison pages, and integration pages. The e-commerce audit goes deep on faceted navigation, product schema, and category templates. The Website audit goes deep on backlinks, competitor positioning, local SEO (if relevant), and internal linking.

Technically yes, but you'd lose the vertical-specific value. If your site is genuinely SaaS or e-commerce, the SaaS or e-commerce audit is the better fit. The Website audit is for sites that don't fit those two profiles.

Yes. The Website audit Full tier includes a local SEO check covering Google Business Profile, NAP consistency, local citations, and proximity-based ranking factors. If your business serves a specific geographic market, the Website audit is the right choice.

The Website audit Basic tier is a good fit for new sites. It catches the technical foundation issues that will compound if left unfixed, without the deeper analysis that newer sites don't yet need data for. You can always upgrade to Full once the site is producing data.